


Extinctathon

by geode



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe, Biological Warfare, Depression, Drug Use, Multi, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-20
Packaged: 2021-02-07 23:30:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21466312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/geode/pseuds/geode
Summary: Mac knew Dennis better than anyone, so maybe this is his fault, for not stopping it.
Relationships: Charlie Kelly & Mac McDonald, Mac McDonald/Dennis Reynolds
Comments: 7
Kudos: 15





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This exists because I reread Oryx & Crake and thought... this is just Macdennis...
> 
> I feel the need to point out I wrote this in February and the characterisation for Dennis is probably from the earlier seasons :P
> 
> Warning for canon-typical yikes stuff with Charlie's childhood that is unfortunately relevant to the book - I don't go into it much but just a heads up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ch1 is v short so posting two together tonight! will update through the week

The true test of civilisation is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,---no, but the kind of man the country turns out.

_Miscellanies, Emerson_

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see the pretty follies that themselves commit.

_The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare_

* * *

Mac wakes at dawn.

Well, not dawn, but in a place where time doesn't mean shit anymore it's dawn for him because that's when he wakes up. He rolls out of the tree in graceful parkour and goes for a piss in the bushes.

It's already too hot to do anything, so afterwards he takes his plastic bag and sits in the tree's shade, rootling through his meagre supplies in search of breakfast. Not much luck. He'd finished his last batch of energy balls a few days ago so it was onto the gross canned shit. God, he misses the days of fast food, gorging himself until he was sick, the tight plump skin of his stomach that's now disturbingly flat, almost caving in on himself. He needs to work out sometime soon. Not today though: too hot. Too tired.

After breakfast, he leans back against the tree and naps.

###

Along the beach there's laughing and splashing coming from the camp. It's actually a little closer than that, which means they're coming to see Mac, but he wants to keep pretending he's asleep for as long as possible so he stays as he is.

"Ronnie! Ronnie!" they cry when they arrive at his tree. He can feel some welcome shade falling on his outstretched feet, which means they're right in front of him, so he cracks open an eye. Yup, it's the kids; five of them, smiling down at him like he's actually worth their time. "Oh Ronnie, look what we found!" they cry.

Mac gets to his feet, stretching, and tries to school his expression into one of interest in preparation for whatever shit they have for him today.

One of them is holding an exhaust pipe, another some knotted shoelaces, another a squashed and faded Wolf Cola can. He _ooh_s and _ahh_s unconvincingly, but they've never known any different so it's good enough for them.

"Oh Ronnie, where is your hair?" one of the girls asks him.

"My... what? My hair?" He reaches up in a moment of panic in case he somehow had really lost his hair, but no, still there, still crispily slicked back with it's own grease.

"Your green! Your green!"

Oh, they meant his Eagles cap.

"It's still drying from the rain last night," he says truthfully.

"But what if Dennis tries to speak to you? He will not be able to call you without your hair."

Goddamnit. Why did he have to tell them all this bullshit?

Oh right, because he was blind drunk.

"Dennis will find a way," he assures them. "And he only really calls at lunchtime."

"What is lunch?"

"Food. Midday food."

"Does Dennis eat?"

Mac almost laughs. "No, he doesn't have to."

"Not even clouds?"

"Why would he eat the clouds? He lives in them."

This seems to satisfy them, and they gather their things and head off back down the beach. There goes his human contact for the day. Well, you know.

He stretches some more before climbing up to retrieve his cap. He only really needs it when the sun is directly overhead and the tree has no shade for him - otherwise it's just an extra layer that makes the heat worse. But the sun is getting up there, so he climbs down and settles back against the trunk. This is about as busy as he gets, so he's already ready for another doze before scrounging something else to eat and going to the storm shelter.

When's crab day? Not today unfortunately. Maybe tomorrow though, if he's lucky.

###

Mac's mom had worked at OrganInc Farms right at the start, which was a cattle laboratory that supplied a lot of America's dingiest fast food chains. It's greatest achievement was the invention of the pigoon, giant ugly pigs with almost-human brains. They creeped Mac out as a kid, particularly their eyes. Once one escaped from its pen and yoinked a baby from his pram and ate him delightedly in front of his mom, smearing blood all over the entrance to the mall. Mac didn't see it, but he saw the blood.

Mac's mom did some kind of nerd shit, worked with microscopes, that kind of thing. That's where his parents met: his dad worked in scientific disposal - a fancy name for blowing shit up - and they met at an office party. They were pretty happy until they had Mac, from what he hears. They used to talk about the good old days - back when they used to talk - and how they wish they could go back and do other things (aka: not have Mac). He used to have a home video of one Christmas that he'd watch sometimes when no one was home at weekends. They all looked happy in that, Mac included. As the years went on, it became the only thing that reminded Mac his parents had even loved each other, and more to the point, in theory loved Mac.

Mac liked OrganInc Farms. His mom always had cool stories about animals spontaneously catching on fire, sometimes people too. He didn't give a shit about their actual jobs, which sounded boring as hell, but it was an alright place to grow up. The biggest bane of his life was the Corpsmen not letting him throw rocks at the sealed trains whizzing past, but apart from that life was good. He'd never known life outside the Compounds, although sometimes he saw the cities on TV - ridden with disease and crime. OrganInc was pretty small and rundown, way down on the food chain, but because it was government-run the worst thing you could say about it was that it was boring.

The best thing about his early years was getting Poppins, a weird, faintly immortal, strongly smelling dog-etc splice made of a bunch of leftover genes from various animals. His mom gave him to Mac for his seventh birthday, probably because no one else wanted him, but Mac loved him.

"You'll be the one cleaning its shit up," his dad said on coming home that day. "I'm not touching that filthy runt."

"No one said you'd have to," his mum snapped back. (They'd already started fighting.)

Mac crept up to his room with Poppins as they argued, forgotten, and he went to sleep that night with him in his arms, not caring about the smell, smiling.

Mac started school, which he hated, but there were lots of people to annoy, especially girls which was fun, and he got himself something of a status selling skunkweed. Low grade cheap stuff, which was kind of rare in the Compounds, where the drugs were monitored closely and tested for best quality. Kids didn't want fancy stuff, they just wanted to get high, which is where Mac came in.

His parents' marriage was breaking down, so there was that to deal with when he wasn't at school. He'd be used as ammunition a lot and pulled on like a tug of war rope onto different sides, yelled at both when he refused to pick a side and when he did, and then he'd go to his room and they'd yell at each other long into the night.

He didn't have many friends - or really, any friends - but he had Poppins at least, and people who tolerated his company when they wanted to buy from him, and sometimes the class freaks would give him the time of day.

He didn't watch the news, but he knew it was getting bad.


	2. Chapter 2

Just before high school, they moved, this time to the HelthWyzer Compound, where his mom had got a promotion. His dad didn't want to move, and it took them a month straight of fighting for him to agree to it. They seemed to do it for Mac's sake, which he didn't like: he didn't want to be the one to blame for this.

But despite Luther's reservations, it was nice, this new place. Definitely a bit up its own ass, and an even larger percentage of the people living there were nerds, but a bigger population meant more sales for Mac. Also a better chance of finding someone to agree to be his friend.

It had become clear that Mac's strength was not in science. It wasn't clear what Mac's strength actually was, but he was fucking terrible in school, especially when everyone who went to HelthWyzer was either a child genius or the child of a genius. He was shit at science, shit at math, shit at words. He liked Phys Ed, but they only had that once a week, and if he'd been asked, he only liked it because he got to kick the other kids' knees during matches. But that was probably his favourite subject.

His mom gave up on tutoring him after school; he was a lost cause, no use to her. Sometimes Luther, before he took off, would take him to the basketball court and stand at the sidelines with a group of shady people, smoking, while Mac shot hoops. Those were good times.

###

Dennis transferred to HelthWyzer a few months before Luther disappeared into thin air.

He was obviously a freak right from the start. He dressed like an adult, and didn't speak to anyone, and was introduced as a prodigy (whatever that meant), so when the teacher asked who wanted to show him around the school later, no one offered. Mac's pretty sure he was chosen as a punishment for putting glue on Ms. Kornfeld's chair earlier that week so her skirt ripped when she stood up.

Mac unenthusiastically gave him a tour, pointing out the obvious: the room with the books is the library, the room with the microbe posters is the lab, etc. Dennis said nothing, not moodily, just like there wasn't anything to say, which Mac supposed there wasn't.

When they were done, out of desperation Mac invited him to the mall for a burger. Dennis agreed affably, which further confused him, but they went and sat in the air conditioned glass dome and watched girls from class wander past in groups.

Mac absent-mindedly started rolling a joint as he watched Fatty Magoo from English go into a clothes store.

"You smoke?" Dennis asked suddenly.

"Huh? Oh, no, this isn't... I don't..." Was he gonna have to explain drugs to this bitch? What kind of moron doesn't smoke by now?

Although, he thought, it could be kinda fun to corrupt him.

"Is it skunk?" Dennis asked.

"Yeah, so," Mac replied.

"Nothing."

"You ever tried it before?"

"No, where I lived before was... strict."

"It's strict here," Mac grinned, finding himself getting into this idea of his. He finishes the crappy joint and holds it out for Dennis. "Go on."

He takes it, and Mac lights the end, and then apprehensively takes a drag. Mac's impressed he doesn't cough: the guy must have super strength restraint.

"Good?"

Dennis didn't say anything for a moment, and then exhaled slowly. "Jesus."

Mac laughed. "Yeah, it's pretty bad stuff, but it gets you there."

"Where?"

"You'll see."

An hour later they're at a different greasy food chain and Dennis is a whole different person. They're slumped at their table, both on the same side, rating everyone who walks past out of five stars. Dennis had many opinions on clothes and hair and bodies, almost making it into a science itself, like: "Three and a half stars for her. Breast to butt ratio totally off, but her walk implies she's single and sluttily available, which I appreciate, to save time."

He was like Sherlock Holmes, except if Sherlock Holmes ran a porn site. Mac had never had anyone to talk about girls with, and Dennis shared his cocktail of contempt mixed with fascination.

They rated the guys who walked past too, which was slightly less exciting, because most of them wouldn't care if they knew what the two of them were doing, which took away some of the secret thrill. And anyway, Dennis was more brutal with the girls; he never rated a guy under a three, because he said "the standards are inherently lower".

###

They started hanging out together, getting high, going to the movies and the mall. Dennis even started helping Mac with all the classes he was failing (which was all of them) so at least now he might graduate, even if no colleges take him.

All the other kids still thought he was a freak and avoided him, which didn't make much difference to Mac, who was used to this. It felt good to have a friend, someone you could email late at night and partner with in class and eat lunch with.

His parents got off his back a bit too: his mom was pacified that he was improving his schoolwork, and his dad seemed to like Dennis, for whatever reason. He liked to say, "That kid is going places," whenever he'd come over; Mac was jealous of that, because it's not like Luther ever said that about him. (He could just about pretend he did it behind his back.)

Dennis had a sister, a twin, but she was in their last Compound's loony bin for an arson-related breakdown. Mac thought it was a shame it wasn't OrganInc, because it sounded like she'd fit right in, and he would've loved to see something like that.

So it was just Dennis and his mom and dad, and then just him and his dad and a string of slutty women. He wished after his own dad left that his mom would've started hanging out with a string of slutty men, but she didn't seem interested in anything but smoking after that, and it was never Mac's shit.

###

Luther disappeared the spring of Mac's sophomore year. He just came home from school one day to see a bunch of Corpsmen in his kitchen, in full badges and guns and sunglasses under the flickering strip lights. Luther had left him a note that just said he'd taken Poppins and freed him so he'd get eaten by a bear-splice and be put out of his misery. Mac was way more upset about Poppins than his dad. He had _no_ fucking right to take him! He was all Mac had.

His mom was upset though. Almost immediately, she stopped talking to him, and started just sitting in the same chair all evening, chain smoking and watching the news with the sound off. Mac tried to provoke her with incessant talking or showing her shit or standing between her and the TV, and sometimes she'd throw something at him. Mostly she'd ignore him.

The Corpsmen seemed to think his dad was in on some terrorist thing to blow up a Compound, which Mac wouldn't put past him, but he truthfully said every time they interrogated him that he didn't know anything.

He stayed at Dennis's house for a few night right after. They'd smoke until they were dizzy and then lie on his bedroom floor in mostly silence. It's something Mac did for him a few months later when Dennis' mom died suddenly, contracted a deadly bioform and melted right into the ground.

###

The afternoon's storm is coming in fast when Mac wakes up again, so he takes his plastic bag and hurries to his usual spot in the rubble of a beach side condo. He reaches his leaning concrete shelter just as the rain starts, saving his cap this time, and hunkers down in the grime and crunchy leaves. He sets up his bucket ontop of the slab above him to catch the rainwater, and then eats his main meal of the day: the rest of the can of spaghetti hoops and a pop tart. If he's lucky he won't be hungry again before he goes to sleep that night.

He sits and listens to the thunder. He keeps meaning to hang out with the others during a storm one day, see what they do, but every time he just cannot be bothered. They'd probably just sit around like normal anyway, maybe do a bit of singing in the rain. He can't tell if the thought of that pisses him off or not. It's like that with everything they do: slightly irritating, but also something Mac wishes he could join in on, just for something to do, some company.

Out of boredom, he actually does get in a quick work out in his shelter, mainly push ups because of the tight space. He also has a bit of a wash, stripping off his shorts and tank and standing outside for a minute before he starts to shiver. He only allows himself a wash a week, out of fear of hypothermia and the general terror of being out in the open, naked, during a storm. Easy target, for predators and lightening both.

He has to air dry after before he puts his clothes back on, which means hiding out an hour or so after the rain stops so he doesn't have to cross the beach with his dong out. It's not like there's anyone to see, but still. It's the principle of it.

###

They would watch porn together a lot. In winter, they'd pretty much only watch porn and play video games, which was just fine with Mac. Dennis had a sick computer set up with two screens at either side of his room, so they could sit back to back in the middle and play against each other, if they were playing anything.

Dennis' favourite game was Exintathon, a bullshit nerd game about animals that had gone extinct. It was a memory game, which was just the type of thing Dennis loved. Mac wasn't very good at it, and games would usually end with him throwing his controller at the wall and Dennis smirking at him. There was a chatroom in the game where everyone had usernames based on one of the extinct animals. According to Dennis, the objective was to rack up enough points to be awarded membership for a different - more exclusive - secret chat. It all seemed fucking stupid to Mac.

For a while Dennis insisted on them referring to each other as their usernames: Mac got the Rat, a privilege according to Dennis, as one of the most prominent species throughout human history. The last ones had recently been put down by lethal explosion in Europe, so they were officially gone. Of course, rat-splices were rampant, but their pure-gene relatives were no more. Mac thought it was a pretty weak username, all the same, but he didn't really mind when Dennis used it, because he never gave anyone else a nickname at school. This sense of pride was tempered a bit by the fact that sometimes, at least not when other people were around, Dennis would call him "Ronnie the Rat" for the alliteration. Mac would almost punch him every time, except he said it sort of... fondly, like he wasn't really taking the piss, even though he was. Dennis confused him, even then.

Dennis himself was Alpha Bovine. He tried to explain it a couple of times to Mac, how it wasn't a species so much as a status - "but still counts!" - but Mac didn't really care, although he got the feeling the other players in the game probably did. He knew "alpha" meant important, and he knew it was basically a cow, which had gone the same way as the rat, years before. Rats are more badass than cows anyway, so it didn't bother Mac to call him by it.

After a while they stopped playing so much Extinctathon and started watching a lot more porn, and they dropped the names too. Mac had a feeling, even then, that Dennis had probably only stopped playing with him, and kept up with it by himself, always reaching for that ultimate win.

###

They watched some weird shit on the internet, out of boredom and curiosity, browsing the dingy corners of the web to find something entertaining. Dennis would be in control of their viewing, skipping around as much or little as he liked, although he always seemed to be able to tell when Mac was into something, and stayed on it a little longer.

This is how they found Charlie. He was about the same age as them, but seemed to be from a whole different world. These shady sites never left a trail, no city names or incriminating landmarks on show. Most of it blurred together, but Charlie stood out because he looked right at the camera while they were site-hopping, and Dennis paused it and Mac stared at his face for several silent minutes. Of course, he didn't have a name then. He was just some kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, in the underbelly of the world, who looked straight at them with... with what?

It was an unreadable expression, or maybe too readable. Too many expressions all at once so that they flattened out into a blank stare, directed right at Mac. Who was he? What was he trying to say? How come Mac felt like he knew him somehow?

Maybe it's because he looked like someone Mac could know, out there, in the world beyond the safe bubble of the Compounds. It made him feel very cut off suddenly, like he did when he caught a few seconds of the news by accident and realised his relatively decent life was in the minority. The kid was just like Mac, but from the city. That could have been _him_.

He shivered. Dennis took a screengrab, and emailed it to him. They didn't talk about it, but they avoided that particular site after that.

###

Mac feels restless, and the fifth of Scotch in his prized final bottle is calling to him. He knows he shouldn't, he should save it, sip it in moderation and make it last a few weeks. But he's never been very good at moderation.

When the sun sets and the cold creeps in, made worse by his slightly damp clothes, he caves and retrieves the bottle. He's had to be careful, ever since those first few weeks of being completely out of it, not to go too hard on the alcohol. For one, rationing, but also because it makes it so much worse afterwards. He wants to forget everything, but if he does that he has to remember it all again in the morning, a fresh cut.

But tonight he's miserable; he's been thinking too much. He drinks a quarter of what's left, then another quarter, and waits for it to hit him. He decides a little too late to climb into his tree before he gets too wobbly to, so that's a struggle, but he manages it. He lies on the wobbly platform and watches the stars come out, occasionally taking another swig. The purple clouds are dancing. If he squints hard enough they make the shape of people, people he knew, wandering about. There's Tim Murphy, and Fatty Magoo, and Carmen Mendoza, and the guy who worked at the pizza place in HelthWyzer, and his mom, and Dee--

No one comes to talk to him. He keeps drinking in the hope that someone will.

Right when he's about to drip the last drop onto his tongue, a Charlie shape forms in front of him.

"You asshole, you never save any for me," he says.

"It's mine, bitch," Mac grumbles delightedly, hugging the empty bottle to himself stupidly like Charlie could swipe it.

"No manners," Charlie guys, and floats over to him. "You still feeling sorry for yourself?"

"Yeah, so," Mac replies. That was one of his favourite replies back in the day. _Yeah, so. And what?_

He imagines Charlie rolls his eyes.

###

He wakes up, probably actually nearer dawn today, hungover. His whole head feels like it's being squeezed, and he has to lie still for almost an hour until he feels steady enough to climb down from the tree.

He's instantly annoyed at himself for using up all the Scotch: fuck knows where he can get any more, everyone already drank it all in the beginning, himself included. He pisses on his piss bush, puts on his Eagles cap and stands swaying in the shade of the tree, thinking.

_You still feeling sorry for yourself?_

Mac thinks he's allowed. But at the same time, doing literally anything would potentially give him back his will to live. Plus, he needs things. More food, more pills for energy balls, a gun. Maybe some sunblock for his tattoos, they're getting super faded, and it's not like he can get them touched up.

Maybe a trip will do him good. Take his mind off... his mind.

He eats a crumbling nutrition bar while he counts the food he has: he can fill the scotch bottle with water from his bucket, it's heavy but large; a packet of peanuts, a can of baked beans, another pop tart, half a jar of pickles. Yeah, he'd need to go out soon anyway, and this is enough to get him to the nearest Compound.

Decision made, he starts off down the beach towards the others. He's almost definitely still a little bit drunk, but in a way that's good, this is the mood he needed to get him off his ass. He approaches the camp, slowly, not wanting to scare them. He can see they're all still sat around this early in the day, eating and poking at little fires, the children playing with each other.

One of the men spies him and comes over, smiling.

"Greetings, oh Ronnie," he says. Mac thinks it's Abraham Lincoln.

"I have come with a message," he says. Abraham Lincoln looks suprised and pleased.

"From Dennis?"

"Sort of."

###

The camp is essentially a big circle in the sand, marked by a ring of pebbles. Mac steps over the pebbles and they join the main group by the biggest fire. Several of the women call their children over to listen to him, and quickly he has a captive audience. It's not often he comes to them.

"I'm here to tell you I'm going away for a few days," he begins. Murmurs, cautious but excited. "I've been away before, but this time I'm going a little further. In fact, I'm going to Paradise."

"Paradise? Paradise?" they chorus, unabashedly excited now. Some of the children look confused - they don't remember.

Empress Josephina explains to them: "Paradise is where we came from, before we lived here. It is a good place, made by Dennis."

"Are you going to see Dennis?" they ask.

"Yes," Mac answers, because why the hell not.

"Will you see Dirtgrub too?"

"Perhaps." That might be too far.

"Will you give Dennis our thanks, oh Ronnie?"

"I will."

"Are you leaving now?" Sacajawea asks. "You haven't had your crab!"

"You must have your crab!" they chorus again, and several of them break away to go towards the shore, presumably to get a crab.

Mac figures he can wait a bit, if there's crab involved.

###

It had been one of the first things he told them, that while they didn't eat animals, he had to, because he didn't have a soul or something. It became a ritual: each week they would catch a crab, and cook it, while apologising and thanking Dirtgrub (who in Mac's new lore, was in charge of animals; Dennis had everything else) for the sacrifice, yada yada. Deal is he gets one good meal a week, which he realised quickly he should've made a crab a day, or even fish, or rabbits and stuff. He'd always liked crab, and they were everywhere around here. It's why he never goes in the sea, after all those horror stories about escaped mutated sewer crabs. But the others are very adept at fishing, despite their vegetarian ways.

They bring him his crab and steam it on the fire, Mac's mouth watering after days of dried, cold barely-food.

He eats while they tell him all about their dull adventures, the animals they saw and either recognised or didn't, asking him a few questions about the names of things. Mac thinks for the millionth time that it might be boring, or irritating, but hanging out with them isn't half as bad as sitting in his tree alone. Maybe when he gets back he can tell them that Dennis told him to move in. And get a crab a day.

He's finished sooner than he'd like. At least his head feels a little better, but if he's going to do this today (and if not today, he never will) he has to leave now, to get in a couple of hours before it gets too hot. He wants to say something to the others, a good parting line in case he dies out there and never comes back, but he can't think of the right words. He'll just have to not to die.

###

They graduate on a warm spring day, in the morning so as to avoid the already routine afternoon storm. Mac's riding a natural high for once, the high of surprise, because honestly it's funny to him he even got here. He absolutely wouldn't have without Dennis' tutoring.

He's not even nervous about the graduate auction, even though it goes about as badly as he expected. He is reluctantly chosen in the leftover draw by the Maria Sharapova Academy, way above what he deserved, and he's sure they fought management on it to the bone before coming out to shake his hand. It was a sport and sport science college, one of only about four in the country - not for prestige reasons, but because no one was hiring from that pool, especially now that technology had pretty much entirely taken over the sport sciences industry. Even though it was more than Mac was worth, it was still not exactly an alma mater to shout about.

Dennis was hand-picked by the Watson-Crick Institute within thirty seconds of the auction opening. It was the best of the best, and everyone knew it, including Dennis. It wasn't much if a surprise though: he was top of all his classes, and HelthWyzer was like a Watson-Crick Lite. It attracted geniuses.

Mac was happy for him, although this meant they were going their separate ways now.

"We'll email," Dennis insisted as they shook hands at the train station a month later.

"Sure," Mac replied, wanting to say _yeah, so_.

"Come on, it won't be that bad," he grinned, thinking Mac's moodiness was due to Maria Sharapova, which it only was a bit.

Mac made a face back. Their palms were still clasped between them.

"It's been nice knowing you, Alpha Bovine," he said with an edge of something he didn't know himself. Spite? At who?

"You're not getting rid of me, Ronnie the Rat," Dennis answered smoothly, and let his hand fall to his side.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm [soupcharlie](http://www.soupcharlie.tumblr.com) on tumblr!


	3. Chapter 3

And they did email. This surprised Mac, but he was pleased about it. Honestly, his twice-weekly letters from Dennis made his time bearable.

Going to the Maria Sharapova Academy wasn't much like going to college. Mac took the most useless of all degrees, the now-defunct HelthTrack, which was a general physical activity degree with no writing essays (score!) and no science shit (double score!). It used to be to help with sports coaching, but now was just running around and kicking the shit out of people for four years and then you're done.

Mac would say he was lonely, except he was constantly around people: when he was studying, in the loosest sense of the word, on the field, he'd be surrounded by guys, which he liked but it was kind of weird after years of only having one friend. In his downtime, he banged half his department because he felt he ought to. This was the one area he felt he had it better than Dennis, because he had lower standards, so he actually got some. Dennis never seemed interested in anyone at school, and now he didn't mention a girl in any of his messages.

But he did feel bad a lot of the time. He drank a lot, banged a lot, worked out a lot; on paper he was living the dream. But perhaps because he never anticipated going to _any_ college, it didn't feel like it was his dream.

Maybe Dennis could sense the unhappiness he wasn't sharing, because before the first year was over he invited Mac to come stay with him. Mac never told anyone, but he almost cried with relief: it felt like being saved from drowning.

###

Watson-Crick was just like the HelthWyzer Compound, except more bigger, and pretty fancy. Where Maria Sharapova Academy failed (which was everywhere), Dennis' college excelled: it had a lush green campus, clean architecture, good restaurants, a club that wasn't just someone's garage with a disco light.

Dennis showed him around in a mirror-image of when they first met years ago. He looked the same, a little taller, better fitting clothes. He was happy, or happier. He was clearly excited to show Mac the place. He met him off the sealed train and grinned at him like they were sixteen again. "Hey, man."

They went to all the public-access labs and biodomes. The students were big into environmental stuff, and neuro-tech, all things natural but not quite. There were all sorts of splices roaming around, pigoons like at OrganInc locked up in enclosures, dog-etc like Poppins but cuter, lots of critters and small mammals: those were favourites for finals projects apparently.

They had dinner at a place that sold fake-meat burgers, and then went back to Dennis' dorm, which was basically a hotel. If this was what five stars looked like, Mac's room wasn't even _one_.

Dennis had been talking excitedly all afternoon, showing him everything he could think of, but when they got back to his place he seemed to chill out a little, unbuttoning the collar on his shirt and rummaging around for beers.

Mac sat on the plush couch and looked around the room in melancholic admiration: it was even fancier than his parents' old house, and Frank Reynolds was loaded. He turned his eyes to Dennis when he made an _aha!_ noise, successful in his beer hunt. He'd kicked his shoes off now, and when he turned back to Mac, Mac felt a pang of something.

This was just like high school, hanging out at one of their houses, kicking back and doing nothing. Mac had moved out, gone to college, met hundreds of new people, and all he really wanted to do still was hang out with Dennis.

He stuffed that thought down in embarrassment: he had to act cool.

Dennis gave him a beer and stood before him as he swigged. He smiled suddenly, electric.

"Guess what I've got," he said.

"Neon herpes," Mac replied without thinking.

"Jesus, Mac, _no_," Dennis scrunched his face up, and Mac grinned back, okay again.

Glaring at him, Dennis went over to a dresser, pulling out a baggie: he waved it enticingly, his annoyance dissolving as he watches Mac's reaction.

"Where the hell'd you find that?" Mac exclaimed, jumping out of his seat and grabbing it, the dealer in him examining it in glee. "I haven't seen any around for ages, and I've _looked_, dude."

"Gotta have the right connections after the crackdown," Dennis shrugged.

"And you have the right connections?"

Dennis ignored him, and reached into the dresser again. "I actually got two kinds: the fancy shit CEOs like, and _then_ I managed to track down some authentic, home-grown, grade-Z skunkweed."

"_Fuck_ yeah - Den, this is amazing!"

"Just for you, man," Dennis grinned, and started rolling.

They did the Compound shit first, and as expected it barely did a thing except make Mac's eyes go funny, which is probably what these people think is what weed does. 

Then for old time's sake he lay down on the floor in Dennis' living room to take the first puff of skunk, and Dennis joined him, heads both at the same end to make passing easier.

"Oh, this is the stuff," Mac sighed dreamily as he closed his eyes. He held the joint reventially above his head. "Oh, I've missed you."

"Huh?" Dennis' lazy voice was right in his ear.

Mac froze for a moment "I love. Drugs," he said stupidly, which after another pause, broke Dennis out in what could only be described as _giggles_. Mac felt him poking his hand to pass the joint so he did, eyes still closed, blissed out. "Just like the good old days," he added, and then opened one eye to squint at the ceiling. _That's fucking sad._

But then:

"The golden age," Dennis agreed.

So maybe it's not so tragic, if Dennis thinks like this too, and he has everything now. 

Dennis lolled his head over, a weight at Mac's side, and exhaled, shallow and long, into his neck.

For a while it's like nothing's changed.

###

One night of his visit they play Extinctathon.

Mac was totally right; Dennis seemed to have been playing it by himself all this time. And now he was a fucking Grandmaster, which meant he got to join the secret chatroom, whatever that actually meant. Dennis showed him, but he didn't understand it. There just seemed to be random world news bulletins, about vaccinations backfiring and riots in cities, shit he didn't care about anyway.

The most notable thing about it was that the Grandmaster chatroom was accessed by going from the regular one and clicking a pixel in the top left corner, and then lilypadding from random site to random site, clicking obscure things to go through portals. "Encryption" Dennis said. It was kinda nice he was showing Mac, letting him in on this huge thing, even if it was just to flex on him about being a huge success. Then again, he could have been trying to get a rise out of him, because the first of the random sites to pop up was a URL that just held the screengrab of Charlie from high school.

"You remember this guy?" Dennis asked.

Mac decided to lie. "No, who is it?"

"From that sketchy website we found?"

"I don't remember."

In fact he still had the email Dennis had sent him with the picture. He looked at it a lot, really, because everytime he did he'd get this feeling not unlike getting punched in the face, and for a while his own life didn't depress him so much. He still didn't know what hold that picture had over him. It's like he wanted to save the guy. Mac had so few emotional connections left (now his mom was lost to him, and Poppins, and even Dennis was gone now) that he'd thought of this as one. And it was a blow to see Dennis using Charlie like this, like a computer background.

Dennis clicked through Charlie's eye and then he was off in the portals, the picture forgotten.

###

Mac went to stay with him a few times over the years - Dennis never came to Maria Sharapova - and each time was like he was being put rightside up again, but afterwards he missed his terribly again, not that he admitted it to anyone.

With Dennis, and his money and connections and everything, they did things during Mac's visits that Mac couldn't dream of doing himself: they went to fancy bars every night, ordered hundreds of dollars worth of food every meal, lived the way Mac always dreamed of. They would hole up for days at a time marathoning movies, high as fuck, or go to parties hosted by rich freshman, or sometimes, just sometimes, they'd go to the city.

The first time, Dennis assured him they'd be going to the nicer side with the good clubs, and Mac didn't want to ruin the moment by saying he hadn't thought there _was_ a nice side, so they went. It was a half hour on the sealed train, way closer than he expected, and suddenly they were in a club, a _real_ club: grungy floor, coloured lights, dancing poles, little booths, and naked chicks everywhere you looked. Dennis got them a booth and fed Mac drinks in strange-shaped glasses and watched with delight as Mac sampled the city for the very first time, a hand on his back the whole night.

"You like it?" he asked on the train back, flopped back in the carriage seat, hair and shirt a mess but his eyes trained on Mac, glinting.

"That was amazing, dude," Mac said; his head was still spinning, and he was swaying slightly even though the train was motionless as it cut through the landscape.

"Welcome to my world, baby," Dennis laughed.

"We can't, uh," Mac started. "We can't get sick from this, right?"

"Oh, we very much can, Mac, but we won't," he yawned. "I'm vaccinated against everything; I have to be, with my lifestyle. I developed a special one just for this."

Mac didn't have the brain power to dwell on what exactly he meant by _his lifestyle_, so asked, "What about me?"

Dennis looked away from the window and met his eye. "I'll give you a pill this time, but next time you can take my shot."

"Next time?" Mac repeated stupidly, heart racing.

"You want a next time, right?" Dennis said, grinning wickedly.

And fuck, he really did.

Next time, he took the shot.

###

It was a real culture shock coming back to the Academy after going to see him. Mac got depressed, and took to more banging and working out and kicking the shit out of guys and drinking, and it all started to blur together.

He graduated with his HelthTrack degree and entered a world that didn't care in the slightest about it.

He'd started seeing this chick called Carmen, so after graduation he stayed with her in her apartment while he looked for a job, any job. Carmen saw something in him, some potential, and she was fun, and there hadn't been much of a serious dating pool at the Academy so it was a good match. She got a job immediately, as a private coach. She'd liked him in college, but out in the real world he didn't really live up to her expectations of a real person. He could tell she wanted him to get a job, and either marry her and settle down or dump her and skip town, and he deliberated for a few months which of these he wanted to do.

And then miraculously, he did got a job. Mailman at AnooYoo, a Compound on the East Coast dedicated to scamming the insecure. Low pay and possibly corrupt, it was perfect, and Mac was overjoyed when he was accepted.

Carmen, not so much.

"Babe, that place just steals money from people with awful lives," she said when he told her. "They promise ridiculous results and can't deliver on them."

"Don't you do that?" Mac answered, not really believing in what he's saying, but it was an easy way out of this, a clean break.

"I can't believe you, Mac," she said after the fight, then the hate-sex, then the second fight, and she stormed out. 

Mac moved out that weekend and started his job. It was shit, but his life would be shit anywhere. At least he had money now for booze.

###

Mac finds a house to wait out the heat in, raiding the cupboards and eating stale crackers, avoiding the rooms with the corpses in. In the afternoon be carries on, hoping to reach the edge of the Compound by nightfall, if not actually get inside.

It's a boring walk, but Mac's used to being bored so it hardly bothers him. Anyway, he has to be constantly alert for threats, conducting ocular assessments every five minutes. It's also actually pretty hard after weeks of napping all day and not doing much. He really needs to work out more, especially his legs. His arms are buff as shit but his legs need work.

He doesn't spot any wild animals on the way through the national park, and then the city. He hasn't made great time, he started too late, so when he reaches the outskirts of the city, he decides to call it a day before the storm hits. He finds a shed with a working lock and eats his pop tart and the baked beans. 

He locks the door when the sun sets. There's howling all through the night.

###

Mac dreams of the others, hopes they're okay. They're always okay. They don't even need him, but he promised Charlie he'd look after them. Also he kind of owes them; if he didn't have a purpose he'd probably have killed himself by now, in some badass way he can't think of right now. That used to be a sin, in his old world: but that's when there was a god to piss off and obey. Now there's nothing. Well, nothing and Dennis. Well. The ghost of him.

On waking up, he eats the nutrition bar, drinks all but a mouthful of his water, saves the nuts for later. He puts his Eagles cap on in vain preemptive attempt to fight off the heat of the open plain, and heads out. The city is eerie as shit, empty and creaking in the wind, but it only takes a few hours to wind his way through the rubble, and then suddenly he's facing the long stretch of land between the city and the Compound.

If something attacks him out here, he's dead, so he hurried, frantically turning his head like an owl at all times. He reaches the Compound walls within two hours, thank fuck, and goes through the broken barriers and empty security checks, again avoiding looking at all the bodies and piles of bones. He doesn't miss this part of being back in civilisation.

He heads towards the residential area to find shelter, figuring he can go to Paradise tomorrow to get all the good stuff. Right now he just wants food and somewhere to sleep.

And of course it's here he sees a pigoon.

They're disturbing creatures. Pig-splices with human brains, huge, amoral, vicious, always hungry. The image of the baby being eaten out of its pram washes over Mac like a warning when he spots it. It stares at Mac, and he knows immediately it's not alone. Sure enough, more amble into view, making a line across the road a few hundred metres from him. He casually changes directions to go towards the watchtower to his left rather than the houses up ahead. The pigoons advance on him slowly, which is worse than them charging for some reason. 

Mac reaches the watchtower door and shuts it behind him just as they start running; he bars it by pushing over a filing cabinet shelf, heavy enough for a quick job, and runs through another door to another room. This one leads to a staircase, presumably to the tower, and Mac swears in relief, powering up the stairs as the door behind him is broken through.

He peers down from several rings of stairs above the animals, and yep, they're snuffling at the bottom step, unable to climb up.

He carries on up the stairs, heart beating madly. "Shit. _Shit_." The daze he's been in for hours, days, weeks, months, starts to lift, and he's left with blind panic.

There's a watchman's quarters at the top, with a vantage window over the Compound below and the flat plain beyond the walls.

Mac collapses on the hard mattress and blacks out.

###

It was either that Dennis liked saving him, or that Mac was very prone to needing to be saved, and by Dennis.

Whatever it was, it lead to fucking _years_ as a fucking mailman, out of his mind both with boredom and alcohol, and interspersed only with emails getting less and less frequent, the blur of his life resuming, and then suddenly Dennis was at his door, same grin, same hands-in-pockets stance, same clothes, same bright eyes.

"Hey," he said.

"What the fuck," Mac replied, before remembering himself, "...are you doing here?" he amended.

"You sounded bad in your last email."

"Did I? Well I'm..."

"You don't have to lie to me, Mac."

_Yeah, so._

He opened the door wider and let him in.

His place was a mess, pizza boxes everywhere, dust, general dirt, no feminine signs anywhere. When he looked at it through Dennis' eyes, it told him exactly what kind of life he was leading, and it just depressed him more.

Dennis had been working at a science Compound called RejoovEnesence since college, and was clearly a big deal there. He was working on some project he never went into detail on, with people he didn't name, for ends he didn't explain.

They had dinner (Dennis paid) and drank some expensive whiskey Dennis had brought down, and then the next morning Dennis offered him a job.

"I want you in on this," he said solemnly, a light hand on his arm the same as in those clubs, years ago now. Mac swallowed.

"On what?"

"What we're you doing at Rejoov."

"Which is?"

"You'll see. But I want you there."

"Why?"

"Look at yourself, Mac. This can't be the life you envisioned."

"We can't all be fancy businessmen, Dennis."

"_You_ could be."

Mac didn't know what that meant, so he asked, "What would this job involve?"

"I need someone to take care of the... people side of things."

"The shit does that mean?"

"You'll see. But you'll have a great apartment, great Compound, you'll work for me..."

"Is that meant to be appealing," Mac said, and Dennis grinned.

"Is that a yes?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [@](http://www.soupcharlie.tumblr.com)


	4. Chapter 4

And so a new chapter of Mac's life started. Or rather, he came back to his life again, after years of black nothing.

He moved into an apartment across from Dennis', and more often than not it was just as if they lived together. Everything could be signed off, by Dennis, as a work expense, and Mac learnt very quickly that he had no qualms with living luxuriously alongside him, wreaking havoc as they went. Dennis hired people to do Mac's cleaning, groceries, errands; he got him a massive entertainment studio so they could watch something other than Predator, and made the apartment's second bedroom into a cinema; he installed dozens of ridiculous things Mac might want - an expensive coffee machine, a jacuzzi bath, an aquarium with fish that would never die, in a rainbow of colours.

Dennis was also king at RejoovEnesence, so by association Mac was too. No more being bossed around by shitdicks: instead he got free passes to all the best clubs and bars in the Compound and everyone treated them like fucking _royalty. _It was the kind of life he hadn't quite believed in, but he supposed if anyone could get here, it would be Den.

He fell into step with it ridiculously quickly. It was just like those visits in college, bright sparks in a sea of gloom, but all the time now: Mac was just happy to be along for the ride.

Because he wasn't doing much, not really, not in terms of work. Dennis' offer was completely made up, which was alright by Mac, and kind of sweet. He'd basically shadow Dennis and offer snarky comments about him being a nerd. Occasionally he'd be asked some vague question he wasn't qualified to answer about muscle build or optimum daily exercise routines, which would get a vague answer and be left at that.

Which brings up what actually goes on at Rejoov.

Which is hard to explain.

###

"Immortality," Dennis told him, a week after he'd moved in.

"Uh... what?"

"The death of death."

"Shut up," Mac punched his arm, then caught his expression. "Wait, are you serious?"

"Deadly," Dennis quipped, and Mac almost punched him for real.

"How are you doing that then?" he asked, scrambling to catch up. 

"Two things. The first is about sex."

_That_ wasn't what he expected.

"What about it?"

"Well, really it's about elimination."

This was a word he'd learnt recently from someone who was trying to ask him about protein and enzymes or something; he's pretty sure Dennis made him ask it, from his furtive glances.

"_Eliminating_ sex?"

"Oh, no, quite the opposite. Eliminating _love_ from it."

According to Dennis, love was the thing making most people miserable, and sex was the thing making most people happy. Mac had heard this argument many times before when they were blind drunk in Dennis' bedroom watching softcore. Mac always rolled his eyes, because he couldn't exactly disagree, with his track record, although sex never made him that happy anyway.

"It seemed the best place to start," Dennis said now. We've created a pill that is at once a contraceptive, aphrodisiac, and lowers the emotional component to zero. _So_," here he smiled dazzlingly, "no overpopulation, constant sexual fulfilment, and no place for love."

"And people are actually taking this?"

"Of course people are taking it," he said, and then winked suddenly as he took a swig from his beer. "Mac... the _things_ you can do on this stuff..."

Mac swallowed and looked down at the tabletop where he'd been picking at his beer label. In an effort to switch gears, he scrambled to work out what Dennis was actually saying.

"Wait," he stopped, looking back up. "That's... not immortality."

Dennis' eyes narrowed approvingly as he took another swig. "No." He didn't elaborate, and Mac scrambled some more. His heart was picking up pace, just a little bit, and he had this weird feeling that he was on the edge of something.

"So what's the second thing?"

###

Mac's first time in Paradise is seared into his brain. The Rejoov grounds themselves were so beautiful, and the dome so alien-looking, and then Paradise itself was... what was it? There was nothing like it. It was like your brain being fried.

Dennis' second project was the others.

They had a bunch of names: the Children of Dennis. Homo Sapiens Novus. Mac didn't like any of them; he tried to think of them as people, even though they really weren't. Dee once called them "Dennised", which is one of the more accurate ones.

Mac saw them first through the window of a control room that looked into the sealed inner dome. The inner dome was created to look like a calm forest, with trees and hard flat ground, simulated sun and moon. It was beautiful, he remembers thinking.

They were sitting around, totally docile, some eating, some talking, the younger ones playing with each other using small rocks. They paid no mind to anything. It was fucking bizarre.

"Who the hell are they?"

"They are, put simply, my life's work," said Dennis. "They're us, 2.0."

He'd played God. This was the downfall of Mac's quiet religious fervour. Dennis changed everything he knew.

And Dennis finally told him everything. "We've perfected what it means to be human here at Rejoov. They're vegetarian, so no reliance on meat or agriculture, no need for an industrial revolution. They've no history, no religion, no idea of racism or prejudice - no capacity for war. Immunity to every disease, fast aging: the kids grow up in a couple of years, and there's a painless death at thirty so no old-age complications. Best of all, they go into heat like most other animals, so there's no need for love or feelings - procreation is easy and enjoyable for everyone."

He seemed to be waiting for praise.

"So... they're animals?"

"No, they're... something else. Somewhere inbetween."

"They talk?"

"Of course. We're teaching them, obviously - but only the good stuff."

Mad didn't know what to think. He certainly didn't think to ask why he'd made them at all.

He told Dennis they were incredible, because they were, and Dennis beamed back at him.

###

Mac met Charlie in Paradise.

In fact, he met a bunch of people: Dennis' infamous arsonist sister, Dee. His dirtbag dad Frank was in on this too, some kind of financier. No one else he knows the real names of, because Dennis had adopted the style of Extinctathon and given everyone codenames - or at least that's what Mac assumed had happened.

It turned out that this _was_ actually Extinctathon, or least the Grandmasters from it: Dee was Somali Ostrich, Frank was Desert Warthog, and there was a California Valley Coyote and White Panther.

And then there was Charlie.

He was, of all things, their teacher.

"Who's that?" Mac asked when he spied him in the inner dome, the second or third time he'd gone to look in. No one else had been in the dome: it was forbidden, on pain of Dennis.

"Oh, that's Dirtgrub," Dennis said. "I brought him in to teach them, you know, what to eat and what's poisonous, what different animals are, if they're dangerous, that sort of thing."

Charlie turned around in wild gesticulation, arms flung to the simulated sky, and Mac saw his face properly. He froze.

"Where'd you find him?" he asked, hoping he sounded normal. _Must be imagining things_.

When Dennis replied easily, he knew the game was up. "I have my connections, as you know."

"Why-- why him?"

Dennis looked over at him, but Mac tried to not show anything on his face. "The guy's insane," Dennis scoffed, but sort of fondly. "Lives like a wild dog. Perfect for this kind of project. Real weird guy."

Mac didn't answer, and commented inanely on something in the dome, and Dennis went off on a tangent, and Mac was left to think about what was going on.

Later, Dennis introduced them. He was right - Charlie was a nutcase. Mac still couldn't shake the feeling they'd met before. He supposed in a way he'd known him half his life.

"Dirtgrub, the Rat," Dennis had said, like it was a dinner party.

"Sup, dude," Charlie said, distracted, shaking his hand and immediately turning back to Dennis. "Hey, can I get some cheese? It's creeping me out I can't talk about cheese to them."

"It's a complex food invention, it'd confuse them," Dennis answered, in a way that implied they'd had this conversation before. "But sure, I'll have some sent to your room."

"Brie," Charlie ordered, and didn't leave until Dennis nodded his head.

"Jesus," Mac said.

"Yeah."

###

They first hung out just the two of them during a movie night Dennis didn't deign to attend. Or rather, there was a lab emergency and he had to bail. Whatever.

Charlie appeared at Mac's door alone with a sixer and Mac didn't mind, he was curious about him, and Charlie _also_ really like Predator, which Dennis had been going off.

Of course, he wasn't supposed to know that he was called Charlie. But of course, Charlie fucked up within half an hour.

"--and my mom was all like 'Charlie, Charlie, if they weren't real Santas they wouldn't only come at Christmas, would they?'--" He didn't appear to realise his mistake; Mac should've just tried to forget about it, pretend it never happened, but he blurted out:

"Your name's Charlie?"

"Oh, shit."

Mac grinned at him to show he's not mad. "Whoops, dude."

"Dennis is super into these dumb names. It doesn't make sense, because he told me _his_ name, and he knows yours, and his sister's--"

"He's a hypocrite," Mac agreed. "I think he thinks it makes him seem cool."

"Alpha's a pretty cool name, you gotta admit."

"Yeah, but alpha cow."

"Is _that_ what that means?"

They both burst out laughing, and when he's regained some breath, Mac said, "I'm Mac, for what it's worth."

"I assumed your name was really Ronnie."

"Uh, no. No, it's Mac."

Charlie frowned. "You kinda reminded me of this kid I knew, he was called Ronnie. I thought maybe you could be him."

Mac felt himself go red. After a second, Charlie shrugged and laughed. "He had the stupidest name though. Ronald McDonald. Poor dude."

It clicked into place: "Wait, Charlie Kelly?"

Charlie jumped two feet in the air. "What the hell? It _is_ you?"

"What the hell!"

"From Organic Oink!"

"Close enough, yeah! Jesus. But-- but-- I saw you on-- TV," Mac spluttered. "I mean a, a shady website Dennis and me found once. That's where I thought I knew you from."

Charlie looked instantly uncomfortable, which was fair enough considering the content of that website. "Yeah, there was a whole thing with my uncle and a garage for a while during high school... but then I dropped out to be a janitor and everything worked out!" he finished triumphantly, like that was him going up in the world (it was, considering).

"This is fucking insane," Mac said. They were just sat there staring at each other.

"Too right," Charlie replied. "Wanna huff something?"

###

They kept this gem of information from Dennis: it was nice to have something over him for once. 

The two of them starting hanging out on the regular, when Dennis was at work and neither of them had dome duties for the day. Takeout, movies, getting high on anything they could find. It was nice having someone in his life other than Dennis, although they still spent twenty three hours in a day together. Mac was just enjoying feeling popular for the first time.

Mac became kinda friendly with Dee, too. Turned out she was being blackmailed to help Dennis out, and that most of the other Grandmasters were too. 

"He's brilliant," she said one time when they were getting fries and soya shakes at one of the greasy joints around the Compound. "But he's a real piece of shit too. Frank's only here because of his money and some sweatshop thing Dennis has hanging over him. Coyote just _can't leave_. Nowhere to go - he made sure of that."

Mac ate a fry off her plate and dodged her consequent slap. "Better stay on his good side," he shrugged. Frank deserved it. Hell, Coyote probably deserved it too.

"You're a lucky son of a bitch," Dee shook her head. She slurped the rest of her shake for fifteen disgusting seconds before continuing. "It's like in Dennis' eyes, you can do no wrong."

On a few momentous occasions, the four of them - five if you count Frank, who'd sometimes crash and pay his stay with pizza - would hang out and get wasted. It was always in Dennis' apartment, crammed onto the leather couch: Dennis at the end, then Mac, then Charlie, then Dee, and Frank in the armchair. They'd watch dumb shit on TV or play this stupid trivia game the twins had made up when they were little that mainly consisted of yelling.

Whenever Mac thinks of this time, he thinks of this - the warmth of Dennis pressed into him, Charlie rambling in his ear, Dee's bitchy comments and Frank's piggish eating noises. Maybe it says something about the state of his life that this was when he was happiest, by the longest stretch he had.

###

The pigoons are still at the bottom of the stairs when Mac goes to assess the situation a while later. There's no way he's getting down this way, at least not alive. He'll have to climb the wall.

He finds an air vent, similar to the one he and Charlie would sometimes fuck around in in the outer dome when they were really, really drunk, and hauls himself up into it, plastic bag in hand. He appears the other end on the patrol wall, the one that goes right around the Compound, and right past Paradise too. Perfect.

He hunches down behind the half-wall to hide from any scouting pigoons and starts the long hot journey along the wall. At the next watchtower, he has a break to drink the warm can of Wolf Cola he found in the watchmen's dorm, and eat the peanuts finally. The air is still damp from the storm, but he had a couple of good hours of sunlight before he's in any real danger. He just needs to get to Paradise, and everything will be fine. He'll have a gun to shoot the pigoons. He'll have food and water.

Eventually, he reaches the watchtower closest to the dome. He breaks into the watchman's dorm, descends the stairs - no predators - and peers outside. Still nothing. He makes a run for it, flying across the residential golf course and straight towards the entrance of the dome. 

As it looms into sight, he doesn't let himself slow down, but he lets himself, for the first time, properly feel the pain of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [@](http://www.soupcharlie.tumblr.com)


	5. Chapter 5

It happened the summer after Mac arrived at RejoovenEsence. He'd been there barely a year, but it felt like forever. If there was a god, he put Mac there. Him or Dennis. Like there was a difference anymore.

It was evening, and he and Charlie were watching a documentary about animals killing each other.

"Do you have any cheese?" Charlie asked, as he did often.

"When do I ever have cheese? Every time I have cheese, you eat it, and then I have none," Mac pointed out, well-worn.

"So no?"

"No!"

"I really fancy some cheese."

"Can't help you, bud. Don't think Dennis does either, or I'd break in for ya."

"Hot cheese. Pizza cheese. Stuffed crust cheese."

Mac blinked away from the violent documentary. "That does sound pretty good."

Charlie met his eyes in excitement. "Pizza?"

"Pizza," Mac agreed. "You can go though, I went last time. Also, it was your idea."

"Alright, alright. I get to pick toppings then."

"Whatever," Mac said. They liked all the same things anyway, and Charlie could barely read so he couldn't order much outside of what he knew.

"Don't start the movie without me!" he yelled through the door as he shut it behind him.

"Bitch," Mac muttered, habitual. He got up to find some beer, maybe a snack. Talking about food was always a bad idea unless there was food already in front of you.

About twenty minutes later, the TV turned itself over to the breaking news channel. A new disease had broken out in Asia, some kind of ebola thing. Bleeding eyes, organ failure. The usual. Mac switched back over.

Ten minutes after that, it happened again, this time in South America. Must be a bad one, Mac thought.

Five minutes later, he got a call on his cellphone: it was Dee.

"Where the shit is Dennis?"

"How would I know? I thought he was out of town for the weekend."

"So did I, but he didn't say where, and he's not answering his damn phone."

"I'll try."

"If you can't get hold of him, you better just come instead."

Mac tried Dennis' phone half a dozen times, freaked out by the news channel, which was now on permanent breaking alerts. Israel, Australia, Poland, Chile, Mozambique, western Russia. It wasn't spreading from one place to the next, but it seemed to be the same thing.

He tried Charlie too, but no luck. That freaked him out most of all, because Charlie was only meant to be down the street. He pulled on a jacket and headed down to the dome. Dee was running around frantically, from moniter to moniter, where the same red splotches of infected area were crowding the world maps she had up.

"Fucking _where_ is fucking Dennis? _Fuck!_" she yelled at him when he arrived, but he didn't take it personally: he had the same question.

Then Mac's phone rang, but it was only Charlie.

"Mac," Charlie's voice said down a very broken line. "What's happening? The news-- Dennis said it was fine-- harmless--"

"Hold up, what did he say? _Dude?_ What did Dennis say?" 

Dee was looking at him now, wild around the eyes.

"The thing he was selling-- in all those places on the news-- the pills--" The goddamn sex pills.

"What?" Mac spluttered.

"I don't know if we-- if I-- are the dome guys okay? The kids in the village?"

"I, I think so, nothing can get them in there--"

"You gotta make sure they're okay! They're just kids, Mac!"

"They're fine, bro!" he assured him. "Just come to the dome, we'll--"

"I don't know if--" Charlie said, and then the connection failed, and wouldn't even connect when Mac called again.

"Um," Mac said, turning to Dee.

She surveyed his expression. "Goddamnit," she said after a moment. "I'm gonna kill that son of a bitch."

"You killing your brother?" Frank piped up from the corner where he'd been aimlessly pressing buttons, flicking through screens. His usual expression of pissed-off boredom had shifted into something else, something quieter. He sighed, and then spun in his chair to face them. "Count me in, Deandra."

Dee grabbed them each a gun from the adjacent weapons room, and with something almost like glee, tossed one to Mac too. He watched them go, and even while it was happening realised it would be the last time he ever saw them. He stood there in the moniter room for a long moment, and then followed them into the corridor, shut the airlock and the main doors behind them, and reset the keycode. If he had to keep the villagers safe, he couldn't let anyone infected come in and pass it on to them. He'd just have to hope he wasn't carrying it either, although from the mere fact he was still alive he guessed that he wasn't.

(That's what Charlie called them: the villagers. He was the only one allowed inside the inner dome, the only one who really knew them, and he insisted the shitty circle drawn in the sand where they all slept was their village instead of just a patch of ground. "They're a _community. _Isn't that what you wanted, Dennis?"

"Community, yes - society, no," Dennis would say, and glare at Mac as he tried not to laugh. It's his fault for giving them their stupid historical names, if he wasn't trying to humanise them.)

Luckily it was the evening, so everyone else, California Valley Coyote and White Panther, had gone home for the night. They lived in regular apartments, across the Compound. It was just him now. Him and the villagers.

_They're just kids._

Their fast-aging meant that they were only a few years old at most, even though some of them looked like adults. They were still literally learning about the world. They wouldn't make it by themselves.

_Shit_.

###

Dennis appeared, as Mac knew he would, an hour or so later at the outer door. The maps on the monitors were almost entirely red now: the news couldn't keep up with itself.

Dennis keyed the old passcode in and was rejected, twice, and then swore. "Hey! What's up with the doors!" he yelled through the intercom, and Mac could tell instantly that he was a little drunk.

"Strict entering policy," Mac replied through the buzzer. "Your policy."

"That doesn't apply to me, idiot. Let me in," he said, then when Mac didn't, whined, "_C'mon_ Mac, it's just me. I'm fine. I'm immune. You are too, for that matter."

"Huh? What?"

Dennis laughed delightedly to himself, like he was holding onto a secret. "The vaccinations we got, every time we went to those clubs in the city - I vaccinated you from _everything_."

Mac closed his eyes briefly and rested his forehead on the door. "Dennis, what's this thing on the news?"

"The rapture," Dennis answered, then hiccuped. "The flood, the _purge_..."

"Oh, Den," Mac said, a huge weight falling onto him, slowly, like an embrace. "What did you do?"

"I saved the world, Mac," Dennis said. "Let me in."

"Where's Charlie?"

"He's here! He's out of it. Just let us in."

Mac buzzed them through to the airlock door, where he could at least see him through the window. He wasn't lying - he was dragging an unconscious Charlie. There was blood on both their faces. Dennis looked slightly wild, slightly relaxed; two things Mac had never seen before at the same time on anyone else.

"Those pills weren't about sex," he said. He didn't ask it, but Dennis answered.

"Not _just_. But we had to make them popular."

"You killed all those people?"

"You don't have to say it like _that_. The real people, the worthwhile ones, are in there, in our dome - _I_ was merely making the way for them."

Mac ran a hand through his hair, eyes sliding down the corridor towards the inner dome, gripping handfuls hard enough for it to sting, in an attempt to ground himself. No luck. "This doesn't make sense," he said, half to himself.

"But it does make sense, Mac! You'll see, I promise. I did this for us!"

"How the fuck is any of this for _us?_"

"We get a new world," Dennis said dreamily, dropping Charlie a little by accident. There was only a few feet between them now, and Dennis met his eyes through the glass.

"It's in ruins now," Mac answered. He was running out of thoughts: he only had the one.

But he needed to help Charlie.

He opened the airlock doors. 

"I knew you'd get it," Dennis grinned, the same grin as it had been all along. Mac is so distracted by it that he doesn't notice the gun until too late. "I'm counting on you," Dennis said, and shot Charlie in the head.

Mac shot Dennis, and they both crumpled to the ground.

###

The next few days were spent watching the news in a state of numbness.

The villagers didn't have any clue what's going on - how could they? - and when he checked on them through the window they just serenely sat around and ate and talked quietly. Through the hidden microphones he heard them ask after Dirtgrub, where he's gone, if he's coming back.

"He always comes back," Sacajawea reassured the others.

Mac watched the monitors and drank, and made his heady way through the food supplies. A few people came to pound on the now-closed doors but he ignored them. The people stopped coming after a while.

The news got progressively worse, the anchors changing hour by hour as they contracted the virus too and were replaced. Eventually all the channels were blank, empty, and then turned to static, one by one. This was when Mac knew he had to do something. Soon the electricity would go down, and the dome's air would shut off and he and the villagers would suffocate in here. He had to find somewhere to take them, away from RejoovEnesence and the cities. 

The shore. That would be quiet, and green. Only a few hours drive away too, so a day's walk perhaps. They could do that. Mac had guns.

###

Mac went in to see them the morning he decided to leave. 

"Hello," he said. "Don't worry, I won't hurt you."

"What is worry?" one said.

"Hello," chorused a few of the more confident.

"A worry is... a fear. Do not fear me." He felt faintly ridiculous, like he was meeting aliens, but it was also kind of fun. He had all the power here. He was now their leader, by default.

"We do not fear," one of the men said, nodding pleasantly. "Who are you?"

He'd thought this out. "Ronnie. Ronnie the Rat." Not that much of a lie, but far enough from the truth.

"Oh Ronnie, why have you come today? Where is Dirtgrub?"

"I have a message from Dirtgrub and Dennis," he said. They knew of Dennis. Charlie mentioned him sometimes in their lessons, whenever he couldn't think of an answer to a question. They thought of him as some kind of deity who vaguely lived in the sky.

"Tell us the message! Tell us!"

"We must go to a new home now."

"Why, oh Ronnie? We like our home here."

"This new home will be better," he lied; it was probably full of corpses and rubble right now, but he'd try to find a patch that wasn't too bad. "And safer." This didn't convince them so he added, "And because Dirtgrub and Dennis said so. They want the best for you."

Satisfied hums.

"When must we go to this new home?"

"Now. Today."

###

Mac reaches the open doors without incident, stopping to catch his breath by the dying foliage all around the entrance.

He has to look. He has to go through and he has to look. He has to remind himself that the Charlie he talks to at night isn't real.

They're just bones now, of course. The heat exacerbated the decaying process of everything and everyone, which is good for Mac at least. Now they're just a pile of clothes and bones, Charlie's plaid and Dennis' jacket. 

He doesn't want Dennis' gun, even if it has bullets in, so he leaves it and makes his way into his old home. His old apartment would be to the left, but he doesn't particularly want to go in. He won't have anything left there anyway - he took it all the first time.

Instead, he heads straight for the weapons storeroom, selects two guns and a shit ton of bullets for each. He grabs a holster too.

Then he goes down to the general storeroom to see what kind of supplies he left behind. A lot of cans that were too heavy to take before, and hadn't really needed anyway while the freezers still worked. He takes as much as he can carry and stacks them up in a rucksack he found lying around. Anything's better than a plastic bag.

Lastly, he sucks it up and goes into the old monitor room, where everyone spent the majority of their time. He's expecting it to be full of ghosts, but it's eerily empty. He raids the lockers and finds some sunblock, scissors, a torch and spare batteries, tape, matches, first aid kit, a shirt. Score. He doesn't look through the observation window at the inner dome, now permanently dark. 

It's weird being inside these days. Mac has an overwhelming sense of dread that at any second the electricity will fizz on for a moment, lock all the doors, and then go off again, trapping him forever.

Once he's got what he came for - food, booze, weapons - he heads to what he thinks was once Dee's room, and tries to get some sleep.

###

He sleeps like shit, wakes early and decides to head out, pigoons be damned. He shoots two on the way to the nearest watchtower, then walks around the perimeter and just descends at the main entrance and heads across the plain, shooting two more there. He hurries through the city (shoots at a racoon), the park (shoots at a rustling bush), and at dusk he finds himself back at the edge of the wide beach. Like he never left.

It doesn't seem quite real, or maybe he's hallucinating from heatstroke, or fatigue, or an infection. Surely one must have evolved that could get him by now.

Empress Josephine sees him first across the shore.

They seem to have made a scarecrow and are singing to it, but Mac doesn't care enough right now to question it.

"Ronnie the Rat has returned!" they chant, and the children run up to greet him. It's cute. Mac could just about collapse, but he smiles down at them so that they don't worry.

"We were asking Dennis for your safe return," one of the men says, and points to the scarecrow. Oh Christ, that was him: the mophead serving as his hair was pushed back like it was gelled.

Fuck. He forgot hairgel.

"Well, yes, here I am," he says.

"Dennis is good, Dennis is good," they murmur. _Fuck you, Dennis_, Mac thinks as he nods along.

"I must rest now," he says. "Tomorrow I will tell you of my trip."

"Oh Ronnie, we are excited to hear!"

"Rest now," says Sacajawea. He tips his Eagles cap at her, too tired to realise she wouldn't know what that means, and that it might start an annoying precedent, and turns back towards his tree.

Its very familar shadow looms up ahead of him.

"Home sweet home," he says to himself miserably. _Yeah, so._

###

The villagers filed out of the dome, past the bodies of Dennis and Charlie (they thankfully didn't recognise Charlie, a blood-soaked heap on the ground) and out into the Compound. Mac was up front with his gun, and had to shoot a couple of lurching, screaming people.

"Don't worry about them," he told the villagers. "Don't worry about any of this. Just tell me if you see something moving and we'll be safe."

It was pretty dead other than that. Lots of rubble and burning cars, but no life anywhere.

They made their way out of RejoovEnesence and across the plain, through the silent city, through the national park. Mac only had to shoot five people total, and one pigoon. It was a shockingly peaceful walk. Mac felt sick every second of it.

Finally they reached the beach, as the sun was setting and glinting on the water. They'd made very good time; Mac hadn't wanted to hang around.

The children scattered in excitement, never having seen the ocean before.

"What is this place?" Abraham Lincoln asked Mac.

"This is Dirtgrub's home," he improvised, to placate them, and also because Charlie probably would've liked this place. Kinda grubby, kinda nice. Away from everything. 

"He does not need it anymore?"

"He has gone to be with Dennis," Mac said. "Up in the clouds. He'll be looking over you, making sure you're alright."

"Dennis is wise and good," Abraham Lincoln nodded, smiling.

Mac bit his tongue and smiled back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [@](http://www.soupcharlie.tumblr.com)


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